US POLITICS SPRING 2011: Let's just call off this country.

Last week, we discussed the extent to which the Obama administration’s rescue of the American automotive industry has been a success. Today, E.J. Dionne Jr. pauses to take note of those who got this challenge “utterly wrong.”

Washington Monthly's Steve Benen keeps giving Obama credit for saving GM, and Benen castigates Republicans who disliked that socialist takeover and were sure it would fail.

Now if only Obama could push Congress on creating jobs for those who are not in the auto industry.

can't wait till the gop congressional majority post-2012 impeaches him for taking bin laden out. behind the scenes they'll gloat that they goaded him into it

While the US may not be able to do much in Syria, can I dream that Obama would at least speak up regarding the brutality going on there and encourage the European Union that is more involved economically than other parts of the world, to implement embargos?

Expecting any foreign policy issue that's not Bin Laden related to be discussed in the White House or mainstream US media now is very naive I know.

curious why you say that is. because the bin laden home videos are jessica lynch-y? maybe there's only so much influence you have as president of the country whose financial industry started the recession

Preventing Al Quadas takes more than stopping Bin laden. Polls in the mid-east continue to show unhappiness with what is perceived as the US's failure to support the Arab spring, and failure to play a tougher role re Israel. While the White House is quietly behind the scenes supporting Syrian protestors, the silence from the President the past few weeks, while intended to show that protestors are not US pawns, seems to be too restrained.

I'd also like him to speak up today re whatever knuckleheaded things Boehner is gonna say to a Wall Street audience today re medicare, medicaid, the debt and the deficit.

the spring is happening, just not fast enough to your liking? a middle east full of democracies would be epic. i'm with you though about hoping he engages the assholes in the house. but again the paul ryan budget plan fail/donald trump birth certificate joke candidacy/white house correspondents dinner routine/bin laden assassination sequence was pretty heartening, reflecting the president's growing command of statesmanship, no?

If he agrees to cuts in Great Society programs, no.

OTM

My gay brethren are taking charge.

Right, he should not quietly give indications that he would agree to compromises on medicare, medicaid, and Social Security, while he talks tough. He has to keep up the verbal battle too.

The US support for the Arab spring is not happening fast enough:

Four days after the first mass shooting, Hillary Clinton called Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad “a reformer.” The first, weak U.S. sanctions came on April 29 — 45 days after that first call for freedom. On Friday, as troops turned heavy machine guns and artillery on protesters, Europe finally followed suit. A White House statement threatened further measures, but said they would depend on the regime’s actions — as if it had not yet done enough.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-is-the-west-so-sluggish-on-syria/2011/05/05/AFmaPPTG_story.html

Yes this columnist is sometimes too sympathetic to neo-con interventionist viewpoints for me, but this time I kinda agree with him.

More dirt on Mitch Daniels that the political elite columnists ignore:

when Daniels worked as a top executive at Eli Lilly & Co., one of the world’s largest drug firms, the pharmaceutical giant’s reputation was tarred by some of the nation's ugliest drug scandals.

In the decade that Daniels climbed the corporate ladder at Eli Lilly, the company was illegally marketing its leading osteoporosis drug, Evista, as well as its blockbuster antipsychotic, Zyprexa, putting tens of thousands of patients in harm’s way. Lilly pleaded guilty to two criminal misdemeanors, paid more than $2.7 billion in fines and damages, settled more than 32,000 personal injury claims — and copped to one of the largest state consumer protection cases involving a drug company in U.S. history, a review by iWatch News shows
...

In a statement, Eli Lilly said the agreements to settle the Evista and Zyprexa criminal allegations did not happen under Daniels’ watch as president of North American operations.

But given his senior management position in the company, “I would have hoped that he would have known about some of these issues, and if he didn’t, why didn’t he? That needs to be evaluated” said Stephen Sheller, a Philadelphia class action attorney instrumental in the Zyprexa settlement.

http://www.iwatchnews.org/2011/05/09/4499/during-mitch-daniels%E2%80%99-decade-eli-lilly-drug-giant-paid-billions-fines-and-settled

could also belong in the right-wing thread, but this article is FUCKING SCARY

http://www.alternet.org/story/150868/the_devos_family:_meet_the_super-wealthy_right-wingers_working_with_the_religious_right_to_kill_public_education?akid=6932.44250.eUY5pr&rd=1&t=2

So amazing their name is actually DEVO

THE DEVOS FAMILY IS TERRIFYING, I'VE BEEN SAYING THIS FOR YEARS.

I keep TRYING to tell people, but they keep BUILDING SHIT like museums and sports facilities in the city of Grand Rapids, which they basically own already.

laurel otm

I've always suspected that Delta or American Airlines or whichever the hell of them first instituted direct flights from GRR<-->NYC and GRR<-->Wash DC inside the past decade, created those flights to give these Calvinistic oligarchs more convenient access to the halls of power. Creeped me the hell out 8 years ago or whenever they started, and creeps me out now.

wish i'd been paying more attention. i knew they were evil before, but only vaguest notions as to why. now i'm on board with you, laurel. *fervently continues to research*

My college used to not accept any donations/grants from Amway as a point of autonomy/independence from commercial presssures (or any other kind, either) but while I was there our old-school pres retired and a slick, more MBA type was chosen for the position and one of his first actions was to "strengthen ties with our local scientific community" or some self-serving bullshit and gobble down Amway's money ASAP. God only knows where that relationship is now but I pity their science depts.

ERIK PRINCE'S SISTER MARRIED A DEVOS, WHAT MORE DO YOU NEED?

are we not scum
we are devos

Also I remember hearing a community organizer speak, a man who worked with poor and homeless communities in Grand Rapids, who met with the developers of the Van Andel Arena sports complex. The stadium was built on the bones of a depressed downtown area, and they razed a whole bunch of low-income housing to get the land, and the developers agreed with the organizer that they would set aside a certain number or percentage of jobs in the new facility to go to people from that low-income group, and it was explained to us that the deal was sealed with a handshake.

When the arena actually opened, the deal was null and void. And this is in a religious community where your word is supposed to be your bond -- normal people deal with each other based on trust all the time. The community guy was being naive maybe but that's just it, these fuckers base their supposed legitimacy on their MORAL STANDING and religious lives/professed beliefs.

I hate oh how I hate.

From table's link:

Gary North explains why getting students out of public schools is key to the Christian dominionist camp. “So let us be blunt about it: we must use the doctrine of religious liberty to gain independence for Christian schools until we train up a generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government. Then they will get busy in constructing a Bible-based social, political, and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God.”

Well I think that clears things right up, DON'T YOU???

yeah that quote was what gave me the howling fantods

"train up"

You can snigger all you want but it's from "Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it" or whatever. BIBLE BIBLE BIBLE LET ME JUST HIT YOU WIHT THIS BIBLE DID YOU MAYBE NOTICE THAT I HAVE A BIBLE ALSO YOU WILL HAVE TO READ THIS EVERY DAY IN THE NEW WORLD ORDER SO BUY ONE FROM ME NOW BUY TWO BUY SIX SOME DAY THE WHOLE WORLD WILL BE FORCED TO BUY BIBLES FROM ME MWAHAHAHAHHHAHAHAHAAAAA

the paul ryan budget plan fail/donald trump birth certificate joke candidacy/white house correspondents dinner routine/bin laden assassination sequence was pretty heartening

inevitable/trivia/worse trivia ie showbiz/making OBL bigger than Nuremberg Nazis

unwell. xp

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal/2011_05/targeting_the_very_existence_o029452.php

In March, Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum expressed his disdain for public education. “Just call them what they are,” Santorum said. “Public schools? That’s a nice way of putting it. These are government-run schools.”

Campaigning in South Carolina over the weekend, Santorum went even further. (via Steve M.)

Rick Santorum, a possible candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, even raised the specter of Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Italy in a speech here Friday night while explaining why his grandfather emigrated to the U.S. His uncle, he said, “used to get up in a brown shirt and march and be told how to be a good little fascist.”

“I don’t know, maybe they called it early pre-K or something like that, that the government sponsored to get your children in there so they can indoctrinate them,” Santorum said.

There is a fair amount of this talk going around. At a home-schooling rally in Iowa in March, Ron Paul, Michele Bachmann, and Herman Cain — all Republicans who’ve expressed an interest in the presidential race — raised the specter of ending public education in the United States altogether.

This also includes far-right media. CNSNews’ Terry Jeffrey argued a few weeks ago, “It is time to drive public schools out of business.” Townhall columnist Chuck Norris has begun calling public schools “indoctrination camps.”

...

GOP debate last night was non-stop lolz btw

I was raised in the homeland of all these religious crazies, this shit about getting rid of secular education is the kind of stuff they force-fed us in Sunday School from jr high on up. Beware of the hidden secular agendas of academics when you go off to college, keep your guard up in all science classes, always be on the lookout for secular authorities to put obstacles in your way and for the world out there to test your faith.

At age 25 or 30 or w/e maybe you find kinda fringe conspiracy theories intriguing from a distanced intellectual POV, but can you imagine spoon-feeding them to precocious jr high students who are trained to look for symbolism in everything? This is what the church I went to did to us, ALL THE TIME. And they didn't mean to, as such, it's just that, you know, the paranoia behind all their ideas is overwhelming even when people appear to be calm in presenting it.

man i can't even

lol'ing at Tea Party calling Boehner "surrenderist"

But now Boehner is bending over backwards to make them happy--his speech to Wall Street yesterday demanding trillions in cuts with no tax increases if they want the debt limit raised. He was on the Today show this morning repeating his usual nonsense about the need to act like an "adult"(that means cutting aid for the middle class and poor and handing tax cuts to the rich and corporations ). Obama and the Dems in an ideal world would show courage and propose a plan that gets rid of the Bush tax cuts or even settle for and stick with the Obama plan (70 % of Americans in polls are in favor of the Dems tax plan for the rich). They'll probably blink again though.

guys there's a thread for this shit

Ringwing crazy thread and US Politics thread covering the same topics is not a surprise though.

is it not politics anymore or

IT'S GENOCIDE

* A new survey from Public Policy Polling shows Donald Trump’s support among Republican voters collapsing quickly. After quickly rising to the top of the GOP presidential field, Trump’s standing has fallen from 26% to 8% in just four weeks.

Tracer, you want to talk about this or Boehner, or is it not political...

Toddlers lose interest quickly.

^rabid primary GOP voters move on from one substance-free demagogue to the next like hyper-active pubescents. Herman Cain, you’re up

my dad, once the paragon of sobriety and prudence, has hitched his wagon to every dipshit show pony the "grassroots" right has rallied around since entering his 60s.

huh, there's a boardgame

http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/6472/a-game-of-thrones

oops worng thread

my dad, once the paragon of sobriety and prudence, has hitched his wagon to every dipshit show pony the "grassroots" right has rallied around since entering his 60s.

sadly, so has my own once-sober and prudent father.

My Dad still supports Obama and plays down any liberal to left criticisms of him